I'd wait the 15 minutes, get two, and trade them for something better than a crummy marshmallow.
The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
261–270 of 282 posts
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point about calories was invalid, as I clearly pointed out. There is a problem of too much , there is no problem of not enough. And energy-rich carbs are cheap . So nothing remains of that argument, it was just silly! > The preference for low cost per calorie foods makes it easy to over eat when your body is missing some nutrient. Exactly. If you agree with me, what's your point? I argued against your very specif…
I think you are failing to grasp the price differences and my argument. You can become obese eating rice and beans for less than the 1.50$ per day. Morbid obesity on cheap calorie dense food is cheaper than a healthy diet. This trend continues if you look at fast food or any quick options. So, no being fat is not cost prohibitive, but eating veggies is . Further, as I said if you eat empty calories like Purple Drank…
Veggies are also perishable. - Rice and Beans don't go bad. You need to have a plan on what to do with said veggies when you get them and need to make sure you use them before they go bad. Rice and beans are as simple as two pots (one if you're lazy), a little bit of water, and 20 minutes of barely looking at the food.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with that, which is precisely why you should control for it, no? You’re example is correct, but not what I was talking about. You’re only talking about one kind of correlation, and assuming that the data is otherwise ignored. What I imagined was will power being easy to test for heritability if it changes from generation to generation. Being white or Asian might correlate with average income for a population,…
> which is precisely why you should control for it, no? No. If willpower is inherited then what is required is a serious attempt to deal with this. If parental income is a proxy for willpower, and willpower is substantially heritable (both quite likely) then naively controlling for parental income is actually controlling away a substantial portion of the child's own willpower! The model needs to specifically allow fo…
If we should do something serious about it, we should first confirm that will power is heritable, right? How do you propose to validate the heritability of will power? And I'd love to hear more about what you'd do about it, and what the problem is.
Why do you think will power is quite likely to be substantially heritable? Are there other better publications that already validate this hypothesis?
If you’re right that it is, then the test I described above would still corroborate, or at least fail to demonstrate that will power isn’t heritable, don’t you think? If will power is heritable, then it will follow the same genetic inheritance patterns as other heritable traits, and one can predict the likely willpower outcomes given that of the parents and grandparents, right?
I still think that it should be relatively easy to demonstrate whether will power is heritable, and that controlling for income is useful and doesn’t pose any threat to determining the truth.
Also, wouldn’t the premise of the original marshmallow test be somewhat moot if will power is heritable? If will power isn’t an environmental or learned trait, then there’s not much you can do about it except for marry up, and excuse the foibles of people who’s bad luck left them with less will power.
FWIW, this isn’t the first follow up study that challenges the marshmallow test, previous studies have also pointed at confounding factors.
“A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
That doesn’t prove that will power isn’t heritable, but it does tend to point in that direction.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#264I've read so much articles about the Mashmallow test that to make this the front news in every paper would be a service for society.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because the more willpower your child has, the more income you will have!
Yes, this studies suggests that is precisely the correlation. As for causation, see Confounding Variable [1]. The hypothical Willpower gene is the root cause of your wealth and your child's willpower. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
Keyword being hypothical though. If there's a study where genetics are controlled, we could then talk about causation. Before that we both have an opinion at best.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point about calories was invalid, as I clearly pointed out. There is a problem of too much , there is no problem of not enough. And energy-rich carbs are cheap . So nothing remains of that argument, it was just silly! > The preference for low cost per calorie foods makes it easy to over eat when your body is missing some nutrient. Exactly. If you agree with me, what's your point? I argued against your very specif…
I think you are failing to grasp the price differences and my argument. You can become obese eating rice and beans for less than the 1.50$ per day. Morbid obesity on cheap calorie dense food is cheaper than a healthy diet. This trend continues if you look at fast food or any quick options. So, no being fat is not cost prohibitive, but eating veggies is . Further, as I said if you eat empty calories like Purple Drank…
> I think you are failing to grasp the price differences and my argument.
Thank you very much!
I think I DO understand your argument, but I have the suspicion that you fail at understanding my very first reply already, which sums it up quite nicely. Your "argument" is none because it addresses an issue that does not exist. You countered something that you yourself invented, an issue that does not exist.
Please, just read my original reply. This is just plain silly: As I already said, if you don't care one bit what I wrote, why did you (and still do) bother to reply? Again and again?
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the predictive power of the Marshmallow test could be ascribed to character traits, controlling to socio-economic backgrounds should enhance the signal of the predictive power, not remove it altogether. This might be the source of the misunderstanding: What you say would only be true if character traits and socioeconomic background were uncorrelated, which is the opposite of what smaug suggested.
If the relationship is `y=x₀+x₁+𝓝`, then x₀ is more strongly correlated to `y-x₁` than it is to `y` alone. This holds even if x₀ and x₁ are strongly correlated, as long as they're not 100% correlated.
If y = x_0 and x_1 = x_0 + N, then y = x_1 - N. Then y and x_1 are highly correlated. But y - x_0 = 0 – which is not correlated to x_1 at all.
y is "success" x_0 is "socioeconomic background" x_1 is "result of the marshmallow test"
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
If willpower is the strongest indicator for income then controlling for parent’s income leads to some strange circular reasoning: willpower is not a strong influence of income when controlling for income.
No, you've forgotten that there are two incomes in question, parents and child. Parents' income and child's willpower are both correlated with child's income and each other.
I think it's already well proven that parents' income is highly correlated with childrens' income, for a variety of reasons. It's pretty safe to use them interchangeably
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you've forgotten that there are two incomes in question, parents and child. Parents' income and child's willpower are both correlated with child's income and each other.
I think it's already well proven that parents' income is highly correlated with childrens' income, for a variety of reasons. It's pretty safe to use them interchangeably
Not if you're trying to identify the effect of a child's willpower on the child's future income. Gotta control for those confounders and prevent endogeneity.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
If willpower is the strongest indicator for income then controlling for parent’s income leads to some strange circular reasoning: willpower is not a strong influence of income when controlling for income.
* Above is true, if and only if: - Willpower is non-socially inherited - Willpower is proportionally developed (to their final amount) in children at the time of testing I would assume the hypothesis of the researchers was that children were more tabula rasa at the age tested, and therefore controlling for variables wouldn't be circular.
That's not the issue. Controlling for a variable is a model like `y ~ x + z` where x is the explanatory variable and z is the control. The commenter complained that since `y ~ z` and `x ~ z` the interpretation of the effect is strange. Not so. This is the sole purpose of controlling for confounders. If parents income were either not correlated with willpower or child's income, it could be dropped from the model. The stronger the correlation of x and z, the more important the control.